If you use a Mac and want to upgrade the firmware of your Feker IK65 keyboard to get VIA support, this guide is for you. I will just list the high level steps to take. I will assume that the keyboard is connected over USB.
At the time of writing, you get it from Epomaker's website. If this link doesn't work, search for "feker" on their website. I noticed that the link to the firmware calls it an lk65 (lowercase L vs uppercase I), which explains why I found it so difficult to find this software on search engines.
The firmware only runs on Windows. You don't have to download this now.
Luckily, VMWare Fusion Pro (virtual machine software) is now free for personal use. You will have to signup for an account to access the download the page. You will need to use either Chrome or Safari, the download page is broken on Firefox.
After you download Fusion Pro, install it. Run the software and it will guide you through setting up a new virtual machine. It will help you download Windows as well. Let it do its thing.
Once the VM is up and running, you will have to go through the Windows installation steps. This is all fairly straightforward to do, most things you can just click "Next". The only things you may want to modify are things like analytics/tracking, this is up to you. Eventually you'll get to the Windows desktop.
Now that Windows is up and running, download the keyboard firmware. Unpack the Zip file. Then you are going to shutdown the virtual machine and completely exit Fusion.
I am going to assume that you have two keyboards: the one connected to your Mac (which could be the laptop keyboard) and the IK65. We will need the IK65 to connect directly to the Windows VM or we cannot upgrade the firmware. The second keyboard is there just in case you need to interact with your Mac. I don't recall needing this capability since I could always just use the mouse.
Unfortunately, there is no UI in Fusion to just connect any USB device to the
VM. You will need to create a config file to reveal this capability. Full credit
goes to Martinj's blog. Make the
/Library/Preferences/VMware Fusion/config file and save the following contents
to the file.
usb.generic.allowHID = "TRUE"
usb.generic.allowLastHID = "TRUE"
After that, start Fusion and start the Windows VM again. After the VM has started, go to the VM's USB settings and you should see the keyboard show up in the list of USB devices. Enable the keyboard and make its "plug in action" as "connect to Windows". The keyboard should be directly connected to the VM now. Just try typing something to confirm.
All you will need to do now is to run the EXE that was downloaded earlier. This all feels very dodgy but what can you do eh. There's not much to this, you run it, and it should just start flashing the new firmware. The whole process is quite quick. Once it is over, you Mac should have detected that a new device is connected. At this point the upgrade is done. You can shutdown the VM and exit Fusion.
On your Mac you will need to run Chrome (for WebHID support). At some point, Chrome will ask you to allow the keyboard to connect, so grant it the necessary permissions when that happens.
Download the same firmware package, we will need the JSON file in that package. After that:
- Go to the VIA webapp's setting page
- Enable "Show Design tab"
- Click on the Design tab (the top of the page has a toolbar, one more icon should be visible after step 2)
- Enable "Use V2 definitions"
- Click on the Load button and select the JSON file
- The keyboard should now be recognised, go to the Configure tab (toolbar on top of the page) to customize the keyboard.
Happy hacking!